Precarious Proletarians: Women Workers in the Javanese Heartland

Abstract

This article investigates proletarian precarity among female factory workers in the interplay of factory and family dynamics in Indonesia’s Javanese heartland. These women workers are part of semiproletarian households that combine income from a mix of precarious work and self-employment within the rural–urban nexus, which encompasses rural villages and the towns and cities to which their inhabitants regularly commute for work. Their connection with land and agricultural activities, along with rural-based networks, subsidizes part of the cost of labour reproduction in labour-intensive industry in middle-sized cities, while shaping their negotiation of patriarchy and capitalist accumulation. Female factory workers’ everyday navigation of the productive and reproductive spheres is often disregarded by traditional agrarian and labour movements. The analysis also points to the inherent contradictions within their experiences, where attempts to negotiate subordination often (inadvertently) reproduce existing power relations.